A Lifetime's Reading: The World's 500 Greatest Books
by Philip Ward

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote this list?

See the heading above and the credit below to find out who wrote this list. If you don't like the selections in this list or the arrangement, take it up with the author(s).

Why isn't my favorite author listed here?

This list may not include your favorite author, but he or she may be on other Great Books lists. Check the author index to see.

See the Great Books FAQ for more about the Great Books and these lists of them.

Year 1

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)
Complete Works
Plato (c. 429-347 BC)
Apology

Crito

Phaedo
The Old Testament
Vaclav Havel (b. 1936)
The Garden Party

The Memorandum
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Tacitus (c. 55-c. 120 AD)
Annals

Histories
Ondra Lysohorsky (b. 1905)
Selected Poems
Ernst Hans Gombrich (b. 1909)
The Story of Art
Poem Into Poem: World Poetry in Modern Verse Translation
Pierre Abélard (1079-1143) and Héloïse (1101-1164)
Letters

Historia Calamitatum of Abélard

Year 2

The New Testament
Suetonius (c. 69-after 121 AD)
The Twelve Caesars
Murasaki Shikibu (c. 978-1030)
Tale of Genji
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Tragedies
Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)
Complete Letters
Maxim Gorki (1868-1936)
The Lower Depths and Other Plays
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
The Portable Coleridge
Lin Yutang (b. 1895)
The Importance of Living
Aeschylus (525-456 BC)
Oresteia

Year 3

Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Buddhist Scriptures
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyvesky (1821-1881)
The Brothers Karamazov
Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888-1963)
Greguerías: Selección
William Trevor (1928- )
The Love Department

The Children of Dynmouth
Teresa de Jesús, St. (1515-1582)
The Life of Saint Teresa
Apuleius, ca. 125-ca. 180 AD
Metamorphoses
Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886
Complete Poems
Arrian, ca. 100-180 AD
Anabasis
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, 1859-1930
Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes

Year 4

The Penguin Book of French Verse
Talmud
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
Sentimental Education
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
Poems

The Bell Jar
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732-1799)
Barber of Seville

Marriage of Figaro
Ovid (43 BC-17 AD)
Metamorphoses
Jean de la Fontaine (1621-1695)
Selected Fables Set in Verse
Plutarch (c. 46-c. 127)
Parallel Lives
Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra
Primitive Song
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
Pickwick Papers

Year 5

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
Madame Bovary
Aristophanes (c. 448-c. 388 BC)
Plays
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
The Stranger

The Plague

The Fall
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
The Secret Agent

Under Western Eyes
Villon (1431-after 1462)
Poems
Ssu-ma Ch'ien (145-c. 86 BC)
Records of the Grand Historian of China
Reiner Kunze (b. 1933)
Poems

Stories

The Lovely Years
Moliere (1622-1673)
Selected Plays
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)
Doctor Zhivago
Voltaire (1694-1778)
Candide

Zadig

L'Ingénu
Pliny the Younger (c. 62-c. 113 AD)
Letters

Year 6

The Poem Itself
Max Frisch (b. 1911)
Andorra

I'm Not Stiller
La Chanson de Roland
Friedrich Dürrenmatt (b. 1921)
The Visit

The Physicists
Émile Zola (1840-1902)
Thèrése Raquin

L'Assommoir

Germinal
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Complete Stories and Poems
Honoré Balzac (1799-1850)
La Comédie Humaine
Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky (1823-1886)
The Thunderstorm
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
The Father Brown Stories

Year 7

The Penguin Book of Latin Verse
Nagai Kafu (1879-1959)
Kafu the Scribbler: The Life and Writings
Plautus (c. 254-184 BC)
Comedies
Juan Ruiz (c. 1283-c. 1350)
The Book of Good Love
Cicero (106-43 BC)
Selected Works
Charles Singer
A Short History of Scientific Ideas to 1900
Emily Brontë (1818-1848)
Wuthering Heights
Virgil (70-19 BC)
Aeneid
Five German Tragedies
Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Year 8

Benedetto Croce (1866-1952)
Philosophy, Poetry, History: An Anthology
Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793)
Three Comedies: Mine Hostess, The Boors, and The Fan
Modern Arab Poets, 1950-1975
Dino Buzzati (1906-1972)
The Tartar Steppe
Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574)
Lives of the Most Eminent Painters and Sculptors
Catullus (c. 84-c. 54 BC)
Poems
Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936)
The Late Mattia Pascal

Six Characters in Search of an Author
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
The New Life
Stendhal (1783-1842)
The Red and the Black

Year 9

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)
Divine Comedy
Wu Ch'eng-en (c. 1510-1582)
Journey to the West
Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571)
Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Poems
Italo Calvino (b. 1923)
The Non-Existent Knight and the Cloven Viscount

The Baron in the Trees
Stendhal (1783-1842)
The Charterhouse of Parma
Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)
Poems
Post-War Russian Poetry

Year 10

Medieval Literature in Translation
Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616)
The Adventures of Don Quixote
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Historical Plays
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)
Canto General
Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
The Buddenbrooks
Tirso de Molina (1583-1648)
The Rogue of Seville
Songs of the Provencal Troubadors
Camilo José Cela (b. 1916)
Journey to the Alcarria
P'u Sung-Ling (1640-1715)
Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio
Antonio Machado (1875-1939)
Juan de Mairena: Epigrams, Maxims, Memoranda, and Memoirs of an Apocryphal Professor, with an Appendix of Poems from 'The Apocryphal Songbooks'

Year 11

Lope Félix de Vega Carpio
Five Plays
Wang Ch'ung (27-c. 97 AD)
Philosophical and Miscellaneous Essays (Lun-Heng)
Juan de la Cruz (St. John of the Cross) (1542-1591)
Complete Poetry
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Comedies
Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Herodotus (c. 484-c. 424 BC)
Histories
The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse
Panchatantra
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
Fictions

Labyrinths

The Aleph and Other Stories
Seneca (c. 4 BC-65 AD)
Letters from a Stoic

Year 12

Gil Vicente (c. 1465-c. 1536)
Four Plays
Tanizaki Junichiro (1886-1965)
The Makioka Sisters
Luís Vaz de Camões
Lusiads
Konstantin Paustovsky (1892-1968)
The Story of a Life
José María Eça de Queiróz (1843-1900)
The Sin of Father Amaro

Dragon's Teeth

The Maias
Suryakant Tripathi Nirala (1898-1961)
A Season on the Earth: Selected Poems
Alves Redol (b. 1911)
The Man with Seven Names
Classical Literary Criticism (Aristotle's On the Art of Poetry, Horace's On the Art of Poetry, Longinus' On the Sublime)
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935)
Selected Poems
François Rabelais (c. 1494-1553)
The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel

Year 13

The Penguin Book of German Verse
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Faust
Harold Pinter (b. 1930)
The Caretaker

The Room

The Dumb Waiter
Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (c. 1625-1676)
Simplicius Simplicissimus
Wang Wei (c. 699-c. 761)
Poems
Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
The Good Woman of Setzuan

Caucasian Chalk Circle
Lucretius (c. 99-c. 55 BC)
On the Nature of Things
Victor Hugo (1802-1885)
Hunchback of Notre Dame

Hernani
East German Poetry: An Anthology
Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)
Out of My Life and Thought

On the Edge of the Primeval Forest

More From the Primeval Forest

Year 14

Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Anna Karenina
Paul Celan (1920-1970)
Poems
The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts
Friedrich von Schilleer (1759-1805)
Don Carlos
Shih Nai-an (1296-1370)
The Water Margin
Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929)
Selected Works
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Capital
Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian North Americas
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Autobiography: Poetry and Truth From My Own Life
Paul Klee (1879-1940)
The Thinking Eye

The Nature of Nature

Year 15

Kafka, Franz (1883-1924)
Collected Works
Su Tung-p'o (1036-1101)
Selections from a Sung Dynasty Poet
Hermann Hesse (1877-1962)
The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
The Interpretation of Dreams
Fernando de Rojas (c. 1465-1541)
La Celestina
Hans Magnus Enzensberger (b. 1929)
Poems
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Moby Dick, or the White Whale
Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946)
Five Plays
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)
Poems
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
Confessions

Year 16

The Penguin Book of Greek Verse
Great Sanskrit Plays in New English Transcreations
Pausanias (c. 120-180)
Description of Greece
Homer
Odyssey
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Sons and Lovers
Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Politics
Plato (c. 429-347 BC)
The Republic
Shih Ching (The Book of Songs)
Osip Emilievich Mandelstam (1891-1938)
Selected Poems

Year 17

Xenophon (c. 429-c. 354 BC)
Cyropaedia
Robert Burns (1759-1796)
Poems and Songs
Euripides (c. 480-406 BC)
Tragedies
Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Notebooks
Epicurus (341-270 BC)
Writings
Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811)
Writings
Homer
Iliad
Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1725)
Major Plays
Sophocles (c. 496-406 BC)
Tragedies

Year 18

Somadeva Bhatta (11th C)
Kathasaritsagara
Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963)
Selected Poems
Musharrif ad-Din bin Muslih Sa'di (c. 1208-c. 1292)
Gulistan
Mehmet bin Süleyman Fuzuli (c. 1490-c. 1556)
Leyla and Mejnun
Evliya Celebi (c. 1611-c. 1684)
Narrative of Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa
Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207-1273)
Mathnawi

It Contains What It Contains
Oliver Goldsmith (1729-1774)
Vicar of Wakefield

She Stoops to Conquer

The Deserted Village
Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951)
The Blind Owl
Yahya Kemal Bayatli (1884-1958)
Selected Poems
Mohammed Shamsuddin Hafiz (1327-1390)
Divan

Year 19

Anthology of Islamic Literature, From the Rise of Islam to Modern Times
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Nausea
Al-Qur'an
Terence (c. 195-159 BC)
Comedies
The Seven Odes
Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821-1890)
Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah
Procopius (c. 498-c.560)
Works
'Ali Ahmad Ibn Hazm (994-1064)
The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love
Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791-1863)
The Roman Sonnets
Muhammad bin 'Abdullah Ibn Battuta (1304-1369)
Travels in Asia and Africa

Year 20

Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891)
Poems
A Thousand and One Nights
Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681)
Life is a Dream
Hadith (Traditions of Islam)
Daniel Defoe (c. 1660-1731)
The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner
'Abd Ar-Rahman bin Muhammad Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406)
Prolegomena (Muqaddimah)
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Abu Muhammad al-Qasim Al-Hariri (1054-1122)
The Assemblies
Takeda Izumo (c. 1690-c. 1749)
Chushingara
Lucan (39-65 AD)
Pharsalia

Year 21

Joseph, Freiherr von Eichendorff (1788-1857)
Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing
Al-Jahiz (c. 780-c. 868)
The Life and Works of Jahiz
Po Chü-i (772-846)
Poems
Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazzali (1059-1111)
The Deliverer from Error
Sinuhe (c. 2000 BC)
The Story of Sinuhe
Yevgeni Ivanovich Zamyatin (1884-1937)
We
Henry Brooks Adams (1838-1918)
Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

The Education of Henry Adams
Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934)
Selected Poems
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
Jude the Obscure
Al-Mutanabbi (915-965)
Poems
Henry Elmer Barnes (b. 1889)
A History of Historical Writing

Year 22

The Penguin Book of Russian Verse
The Aztecs
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828-1910)
War and Peace
William Blake (1757-1827)
The Complete Writings
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904)
Plays
Patañjali (c. 300 AD)
Yogasutra
Marco Polo (c. 1254-1324)
Travels
Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov (1812-1891)
Oblomov
Kamo no Chomei (1153-1216)
An Account of My Hut

Year 23

Aristotle (384-322 BC)
Nichomachean Ethics
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)
Crime and Punishment
Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
Essays of Elia

Last Essays of Elia
Isaac Emmanuelovich Babel (1894-c. 1940)
Collected Stories
Norbert Lynton
The Story of Modern Art
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883)
Fathers and Children
Ghalib (1797/8-1869)
Ghazals
Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Kukai (774-835)
Kukai and His Major Works
Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837)
Eugene Onegin

Year 24

Sources of Chinese Tradition
Queste del Saint Graal
Anthology of Chinese Literature
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
Pride and Prejudice
Li Po (701-762)
Poems
Ts'ao Hsüeh-ch'in (c. 1715-c. 1763)
The Dream of the Red Chamber
Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)
Three Tragedies
Confucius (c. 551-c. 479 BC)
Analects
Alexander Ivanovich Kuprin (1870-1938)
The Garnet Bracelet
Mao Tse-tung (1893-1976)
Selected Works

Year 25

Mencius (372-289 BC)
Works
Federico García Lorca (1898-1936)
Selected Poems and the essay "Teoría y juego del duende"
The Texts of Taoism
John Keats (1795-1821)
Poetical Works
Chin P'ing Mei
Molière (1622-1673)
Selected Plays
Tu Fu (712-770)
Poems
Wu Ch'ing-tzu (1701-1754)
The Scholars
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
Essays and Aphorisms
Lu Hsün (1881-1936)
Selected Works

Year 26

Sources of Indian Tradition
Cantar de Mio Cid
Bhagavad Gita
Saint Augustine (354-430)
Confessions
Poems from the Sanskrit
Premchand (1880-1936)
The Gift of a Cow

World of Premchand: A Selection of Short Stories
Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374)
Poems

Triumphs

Latin Poetry

Prose

Letters from Petrarch
Saddharma-Pundarika Sutra (Sutra of the Lotus of the True Law)
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
The Sound and the Fury
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869-1948)
An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth

Year 27

Thucydides (c. 471-c. 400 BC)
History of the Peloponnesian War
Khushhal, Khan Khatak (1613-1689)
Divan
Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970)
A Passage to India
Dhammapada
Modern Spanish Theatre: An Anthology of Plays
Abe Kobo (b. 1925)
The Woman in the Dunes
Faiz Ahmad Faiz (b. 1911)
Poems
Günter Grass (b. 1927)
The Tin Drum
Mallanga Vatsyayana (c. 3rd Century AD)
Kama Sutra
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Poems

Year 28

Valmiki (c. 3rd C BC)
Ramayana
Upanishads (1,000-500 BC)
Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Contemporary Indonesian Poetry
Pio Baroja (1872-1956)
The Restlessness of Shanti Andía and Other Writings
Chairil Anwar (1922-1949)
Complete Poetry and Prose
Mediaeval Latin Lyrics
Kautilya (c. late 4th C)
Artha Shastra
Lady Sarashina (1008-c. 1065)
As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams
Baldassare Castiglione (1478-1529)
The Book of the Courtier

Year 29

Sacred Writings of the Sikhs
Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)
Complete Short Stories
A Celtic Miscellany
James Boswell (1740-1795)
The Life of Samuel Johnson
Hung Sheng (1646-1704)
The Palace of Eternal Youth
Franç:ois, duc de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)
The Maxims
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
Complete Works
Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889)
The Golovlyov Family
Kabir (c. 1430-c. 1518)
Kabir
Seneca (c. 4 BC-65 AD)
Moral Essays

Year 30

An Anthology of Sinhalese Literature up to 1815
Giusseppe Tomasi, prince of Lampedusa
The Leopard
Chandidas (15th C)
Love Songs of Chandidas
Lucian (c. 115-c. 180)
Works
Milindapañha
Sandor Petöfi (1823-1849)
Petöfi
Bibhutibhusan Banerji (1894-1950)
Pather Panchali (Song of the Road)
Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
The Advancement of Learning

New Atlantis

Essays
Bilhana (c. 1040-1095)
Caurapañcasika (Phantasies of a Love-Thief)
Okagami

Year 31

Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1469-1536)
Colloquies

In Praise of Folly
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843)
Poems and Fragments
Jakob Rosenberg
Rembrandt: Life and Work
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
The Provincial Letters

Les Pensées
A Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetry
Baruch Spinoza (1634-1677)
Ethics
Emil M. Cioran (b. 1911)
A Short History of Decay

The Temptation to Exist

The Fall Into Time

The New Gods
Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas (1580-1645)
Sueños (Dreams)

Historia de la Vida del Buscón (Life and Adventures of Don Pablos the Sharper)
Poetry of the Netherlands in its European Context, 1170-1930
Kenko (1283-1350)
Essays in Idleness (Tsurezuregusa)

Year 32

Robert, Edler von Musil (1880-1942)
The Man Without Qualities
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
Complete Poems, 1909-1962
Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
Memoirs of a Nun

Dialogues

Rameau's Nephew

Jacques the Fatalist and his Master
David Farrant Bland
A History of Book Illustration: The Illuminated Manuscript and the Printed Book
Birds Through a Ceiling of Alabaster: Three Abbasid Poets
The Zend-Avesta
Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564)
Complete Poems
Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956)
European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages
Juvenal (c. 60-c. 140 AD)
Satires
Mo Tzu (c. 470-c. 391 BC)
Basic Writings

Year 33

Kalevala
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
Utilitarianism

On Liberty

Representative Government

Autobiography
Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
Brand

Peer Gynt
Gunnar Ekelöf (1907-1968)
Poetry
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)
Essays
Hjalmar Söderberg (1869-1941)
Doctor Glas

Selected Short Stories
Propertius (c. 50-c. 16 BC)
Works
Knut Hamsun (1859-1952)
Hunger

Mysteries
John Donne (1572-1631)
Poems
Njal's Saga

Year 34

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
The Pillars of Society

A Doll's House
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
Les Enfants Terribles
Eino Leino (1878-1926)
Helkavirsiä (Whitsongs)
Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
Tom Jones: The History of a Foundling
August Strindberg (1849-1912)
Plays
Han Fei Tzu (c. 280-233 BC)
Complete Works
Tarjei Vesaas (1897-1970)
The Ice Palace

The Boat in the Evening
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Either/Or

Stages on Life's Way
Chinua Achebe (b. 1930)
Things Fall Apart
Snorri Sturluson (1178-1241)
Heimskringla

Year 35

Anthology of Japanese Literature to the Nineteenth Century
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Man and Superman

Saint Joan
Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693)
The Life of an Amorous Woman and Other Writings
Ch'an and Zen Teaching
St.-John Perse (1887-1975)
Poems
Basho (1644-1694)
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340-1400)
The Canterbury Tales
Ueda Akinari (1734-1809)
Ugetsu Monogatari (Tales of Moonlight and Rain)
Manyoshu
Epictetus (c. 55-135)
Discourses

Year 36

The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse
Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859)
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Twenty Plays of the No Theatre
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1980)
The Family Moskat
Hekigan Roku
Pär Lagerkvist (1891-1974)
Evening Land
Kawabata Yasunari (1899-1972)
The Snow Country

The Thousand Cranes
Mabinogion
Sei Shonagon (c. 966-after 1008)
The Pillow Book
Marcus Aurelius (121-180)
Meditations

Year 37

The New Oxford Book of American Verse
Antoine-Francois, l'Abbé Prévost (1697-1763)
Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut
John Ruskin (1819-1900)
Praeterita
Horace (65-8 BC)
Odes
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Works
James Joyce (1882-1941)
Ulysses
Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov (1831-1895)
Selected Tales
Abolqasim Mansur bin Hasan Firdausi (c. 940-1020)
Shahnameh (Epic of Kings)
Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920)
Nazarín

Halma

Misericordia
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
Collected Poems

Year 38

Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920)
Fortunata y Jacinta
Jayadeva (12th C)
Gitagovinda
Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)
Diary
Petronius (d. c. 65 or 66 AD)
Satyricon
Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)
Long Day's Journey Into Night
Pre-Columbian Peru
Josef Skvorecky (b. 1924)
The Cowards

The Bass Saxophone
Demosthenes (384?-322 BC)
Philippics, Olynthiacs, and Minor Public Orations
Marina Ivanova Tsvetayeva (1894-1941)
Selected Poems
George Eliot (1819-1880)
Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

Year 39

The Penguin Book of Latin American Verse
Li Yu (1125-1210)
Poems
Modern Czech Poetry
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Walden, or Life in the Woods
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
Collected Poems
Jaroslav Hasek (1883-1923)
The Good Soldier Schweik
Portuguese Voyages (1498-1663)
Like Water, Like Fire: An Anthology of Byelorussian Poetry from 1828 to the Present
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)
The Idiot
New Writing in Yugoslavia

Year 40

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)
Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver
Polish Post-War Poetry
Natsume Soseki (1867-1916)
Kokoro
Poems of Black Africa
James Cook (1728-1779)
Journals of Captain James Cook on his Voyages of Discovery
Adam Bernard Mickiewicz (1798-1855)
Pan Tadeusz
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
Plays
Sasuntsi Davith (Saga of Sassoun)
Slawomir Mrozek (b. 1930)
Tango

The Ugupu Bird
Romanian Poems: A Bilingual Anthology

Year 41

Anna Comnena (1083-c. 1153)
Alexiad
Moses ben Jacob ben Ezra (c. 1055-c.1138)
Selected Poems
Giovanni Battista Vico (1668-1744)
The New Science of Giambattista Vico
Samuel Beckett (b. 1906)
Molloy

Malone Dies

The Unnamable

Waiting for Godot
Nikolai Lenin (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) (1870-1917 [sic])
Selected Works

What is to be Done?
Shota Rustaveli (fl. 1200)
The Man in the Panther's Skin
Miguel de Unamuno (1846-1936)
The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations
Robert Graves (b. 1895)
Collected Poems
Theodor Fontane (1819-1898)
Effi Briest
Modern Hungarian Poetry

Year 42

Giovanni Verga (1840-1922)
The House by the Medlar Tree

Little Novels of Sicily

Mastro Don Gesualdo
Jacobus de Varagine (c. 1227-1298)
The Golden Legend
Guillaume de Lorris (c. 1212-c. 1237) and Jean de Meun (c. 1237-c. 1305)
Le Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose)
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent.
Hungarian Short Stories and Folktales of Hungary
Wang Yang-ming (1472-1529)
Instructions for Practical Living, and Other Neo-Confucian Writings
Akutagawa Ryunosuke (1892-1927)
Rasomon and Other Stories
Judah Ha-Levi (c. 1075-after 1140)
Selected Poems
James Joyce (1882-1941)
Finnegans Wake
Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533)
Orlando Furioso

Year 43

Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855)
Jane Eyre
Pindar (c. 518-438 BC)
The Odes, Including Principle Fragments
René Descartes (1596-1650)
Discourse on Method
Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873)
I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed: A Tale of XVII Century Milan)
Bhartrhari (7th C AD)
Poems
Sean O'Casey (1884-1964)
Three Plays: Juno and the Paycock, The Shadow of a Gunman, The Plough and the Stars
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle
T'ao Ch'ien (365-427)
The Poetry of T'ao Ch'ien
Ivy Compton-Burnett (1892-1969)
A God and His Gifts
Gottfried von Strassburg (fl. 1210)
Tristan

Year 44

The Maya
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
The Cantos
Mariano Azuela (1873-1952)
The Underdogs
Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
The Labyrinth of Solitude

Configurations
Chu Hsi (1130-1200)
Reflections on Things at Hand: The Neo-Confucian Anthology
Pierre Corneille (1606-1684)
The Chief Plays
Alejo Carpentier (1904-1980)
The Lost Steps
Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938)
Poetry
Hasan ibn Ali Tusi, Nizam al-Mulk (1018-1092)
The Book of Government, or Rules for Kings
Juan Jose Arreola (b. 1918)
Confabulario and Other Inventions

Year 45

Henry Walter Bates (1825-1892)
The Naturalist on the River Amazons
João Guimarães Rosa (1908-1967)
Sagarana

The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
The Rights of Man
Orlando and Claudio Villas Boas (b. 1914 and 1916)
Xingu: The Indians, Their Myths
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Leaves of Grass
Gilberto Freyre (b. 1900)
The Masters and the Slaves

The Mansions and the Shanties

Order and Progress
Tokutomi Kenjiro (1868-1927)
Footsteps in the Snow
Theophrastus (c. 372-c. 287 BC)
Characters
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755)
The Spirit of the Laws
Ovid (14 BC-17 AD)
Ars Amatoria

Year 46

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837)
The Captain's Daughter and Other Stories
Torquato Tasso (1544-1595)
Gerusalemme Liberata
Herbert Read (1893-1968)
The Contrary Experience: Autobiographies

The Green Child
Vidyapati Thakur (1352-1448?)
Love Songs
Pierre Carlet de Chamblin de Marivaux (1688-1763)
Up From the Country
Luis Vélez de Guevara (1579-1644)
El Diablo Cojuelo
Maimonides (1135-1204)
Guide for the Perplexed
Hermann Broch (1886-1951)
The Death of Virgil
Milarepa (1052-1135)
The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa
Apollonius Rhodius (fl. 220 BC)
Argonautica

Year 47

Anthology of Korean Poetry, From the Earliest Era to the Present
Italo Svevo (1861-1928)
Confessions of Zeno
Ch'u Tz'u: The Songs of the South
St. Thomas More (1477-1535)
Libellus ... de Optimo Reipublicae Statu, deque Nova Insula Utopia
Farid ad-Din Attar (c. 1136-c. 1230)
Ilahinama (Book of Divine Wisdom)

The Conference of the Birds
Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
Complete Plays
Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848)
Memoires d'Outre-Tombe
Carlos Fuentes (b. 1928)
Terra Nostra
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Portable Emerson
David Jones (1895-1974)
In Parenthesis

The Anathemata

Year 48

Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
Waverley, or 'Tis Sixty Years Since
Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540)
The History of Italy
Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Poems
Henry James (1843-1916)
The American Novels and Stories

The Portrait of a Lady
Li Ho (791-817)
The Poems of Li Ho
Amos Tutuola (b. 1920)
The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893-1930)
Poems
Ilango Adigal (2nd C AD)
Shilappadikaram (The Ankle Bracelet)
Bertrand, 3rd Earl Russell (1872-1970)
History of Western Philosophy
Shimazaki Toson (1872-1943)
The Broken Commandment

Year 49

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
Selected Writings
George Borrow (1803-1881)
Lavengro

Romany Rye
Kuruntokai (The Interior Landscape: Love Poems from a Classical Tamil Anthology)
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863)
Vanity Fair
Sirat 'Antar (Adventures of Antar)
Benjamin Jonson (1572-1637)
Plays
Salvador Dalí (b. 1904)
The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí
Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
Selections
Mishima Yukio (1925-1970)
Sea of Fertility tetralogy (Spring Snow, The Runaway Horses, The Temple of the Dawn, Decay of the Angel)

Year 50

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1374)
Decameron
Nur ad-Din 'Abd Ar-Rahman Jami (1414-1492)
Baharistan
Plotinus (c. 205-c. 262 AD)
Enneads
Abu Bakr Muhammad bin 'Abdulmalik Ibn Tufail (c. 1105-1185)
Awakening of the Soul (Hayy ibn Yaqzan)
José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)
Invertebrate Spain

Revolt of the Masses
Sir Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)
Collected Poems and Plays
Yüan Mei (1716-1798)
Poems
John Milton (1608-1674)
Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicens'd Printing

Poetical Works
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Critique of Pure Reason

The content of this page may belong to the author. The transcription, however, is the result of my research and hard work. It may not be reposted on any Web site, newsgroup, mailing list, or other publicly available electronic format. Please link to this page instead.

A Lifetime's Reading: The World's 500 Greatest Books by Philip Ward